by Oskar Schneider and Marco Elischer
As a young professional, you might relate: you want to be successful and flexible, yet at the same time you want to pursue your ideals and be responsible in your consumption. You are torn between the worlds of flexibility and responsibility. In the following, we want to show that this can lead to a phenomenon called ‘refiguration’ and how important this is for organizing change.
Why is the local presence of social movements so important for organizing sustainability and why do practitioners of organizing change need to be aware of those movements’ functions? This post tries to contribute to answering those questions by discussing the ‘art of refiguration’, as we call it. While the West’s social movements of the 20th century have in large part revolved around emancipation, empowerment, and the vindication of rights, newer social movements have also raised awareness on planetary and environmental concerns. It has been observed that new social movements engage people differently, as they are affected as stakeholders in different ways, and as awareness of the environment could have different psychological effects than awareness of social inequality.
Michael Deflorian introduced one concept which might grasp one function of such new social movements. The concept of refiguration draws from the idea that in late modern societies persons can be described as being sandwiched between the need for stability and high demands on mobility. Therefore, individuals have to seek activities which cater their need for identity construction. According to Deflorian, persons are stuck between “developing an individual conduct and spaces of collaboration that are stable and resilient, in a society that has learnt to be ever more mobile and adaptive” (Deflorian, 2021, p. 359).
Refiguration is proposed as a term to grasp the often-volatile engagement with community-based organizations like urban gardens or food-sharing. It means that by participating in such social innovations, a utopian element is incorporated. During the engagement with tasks of the organization another world is imagined, for example one where in an urban environment food production is made possible. While these figurations of a utopia are always failing because outside of the local niche setting other social practices persist, still they are ever refigurated in activities of the local niche to satisfy the identarian demands of participants. Thus, we can understand refiguration to mean the repeated starting over of the practice of utopian values in a specific place and for a limited time.
Arguably, refiguration is not only an identarian aspect of everyday acts by individuals with destabilized social identities – it is also the engagement process by which new social movements have to attract and integrate persons. Put differently, we propose that refiguration is not only about self-expression – it is also about organizing. In the following, we will suggest that if aptly applied, the ‘art of refiguration’ as an engagement process could become pivotal for transformative innovation in more resilient societies. As an underpinning, we need to focus on two important structural features of late-modern societies. Firstly, those societies, in which we currently largely live in the West, have already been shaped by emancipatory social movements and by what Ulrich Beck has called ‘sub-politics’ – the contestation of authoritative expertise and of tightly controlled innovation through the means and resources of civil society. Secondly, those developments have already triggered some forms of networked niches across the globe showing how things can be done differently – think for instance of the slow food movement or of energy-self-sufficient communities. However, more needs to be done to nurture certain forms of interaction structuring associated with this to in turn make those practices truly transformative for the larger society and viable for everyday consumption behavior.
When an innovative alternative practice is becoming viable for everyday behavior, we can speak of it as transformative innovation. For transformative social-ecological innovation, we need social networks that benefit from decentralized knowledge exchanges beyond the local context but which consist of communities that are locally well-embedded. Oftentimes, the most relevant kind of knowledge to be exchanged is of a ‘tacit’ nature and is not codified. It may often be of a ‘lessons learned’ nature in a project-based or case-bound context. Such knowledge mostly cannot be boiled down to clear administrative guidelines or similar ways of communicating information. Insights from one local context may need to be adapted for application in other local contexts to a larger extent than what is typical for well-established state or corporate activities. At the same time, it is in the very nature of transformative niche activities that they only have been tried out in some or even very few places and that diffusion of practical ‘lessons learned’ is needed for scaling.
Consequently, we need interaction structures that on the one hand integrate practical experiences and tacit knowledge across local contexts, but which on the other hand bypass strongly hierarchical integration, as is typical for bureaucracies or corporations. One of the most viable kinds of structures for those sorts of performance requirements that has been empirically observed is the translocal network structure. Translocal networks have been characterized as connecting locally specific initiatives “by sharing ideas, objects and activities across local contexts” (Loorbach et al., 2020, p. 251). Translocal networks have been observed by Avelino et al. (2020) in the contexts of credit unions, design school labs for social innovation, ecovillages, incubation for social entrepreneurship, and slow food. A translocal network structure is one where local initiatives network horizontally without constituting higher hierarchical orders, and as such has the capacity to establish new knowledge flows that bypass the state and other more traditional forms of intermediation in innovation systems. However, the absence of rigid bureaucracy-like hierarchies does not forsake the need for network leadership, which in translocal networks can be achieved as a more distributed practice (Strasser et al., 2022).
One could say that translocal networks, with their autonomous local endeavors, are held together by shared ideas (facilitating well-oriented communication), and those ideas in turn being ever refigurated through similar local activities. Sets of ideas that let individuals imagine a joint social whole are social imaginaries. That is, social imaginaries give the members of a social group a lot of orientation on how to interact and on what to interact about. We can thus speak of a social imaginary that is common to the members of a particular translocal network. The notion of refiguration, as it is described above, can thus be pivotal to actualize social imaginaries, such as the ‘smart city’ or the ‘circular economy’, into concrete action for sustainable change. But what does this imply for practitioners of participatory governance in terms of fostering the development of translocal networks?
Firstly, from our point of view it is important to appeal to trending social (or socio-technical) imaginaries that are gaining steam in broader society when motivating actors to partake in participatory solution-finding and activity development processes. For instance, it may be worthwhile considering to invoke everything ‘4.0’ whenever it is likely that a participatory process would lead to the novel deployment of digital technologies. In some contexts, this may offer the opportunity to some people (and collective actors) to feel as ‘part of the future’ in the framework of an approachable project.
Secondly, we stress that it is important to anticipate frustrations and, if the relevant social imaginary is especially utopian, even failures. It is possible (and desirable) to render utopian goals more concrete through experimentation with open activities, even when the more sustainable activities, perhaps ironically, cannot be durably maintained. For example, urban gardening projects may show to sporadic participants that in principle they can depend less on supermarkets and their wages for nourishing themselves. This would in and of itself be an empowering experience. At the same time, project initiators and promoters can stress that those time-consuming activities may be hard to integrate into a lifestyle with a full-time job. If aptly communicated, such anticipation of problems could even attract more participants that otherwise would have felt intimidated by the project because of incompatibilities with the current lifestyle. Overall, such communication and planning efforts in practical projects can help spark the imagination of concrete alternative lifestyles as a reaction to broader utopian ideas.
The ‘art of refiguration’ is all about linking utopian ideas to how those ideas might look like in practice in a local context. In particular:
- Appealing to utopian concepts that, much like sustainability overall, can never be fully achieved, only ever more approximated.
- Drawing people to more practical ideas after engaging them with ideals that, in principle, they find desirable.
- Anticipating frustrations and incompatibilities of activities with lifestyles.
- Networking with initiatives in other places that strive for the same ideas in the abstract and do similar things in practice, to facilitate translocal interactions.
While the societal status quo often makes it hard for people to live in accordance with their ideals and values, it is worthwhile to engage in the ‘art refiguration’ to give people a chance to actually try out their ideals. In the long run, hopefully this could mean making ideals more concrete and thus also more practical.
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References
Avelino, F., Dumitru, A., Cipolla, C., Kunze, I., & Wittmayer, J. (2020). Translocal empowerment in transformative social innovation networks. European Planning Studies, 28 (5), 955-977.
Deflorian, M. (2021). Refigurative politics: understanding the volatile participation of critical creatives in community gardens, repair cafés and clothing swaps. Social Movement Studies, 20 (3), 346-363.
Loorbach, D., Wittmayer, J., Avelino, F., Wirth, T. von, & Frantzeskaki, N. (2020). Transformative innovation and translocal diffusion. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 35, 251-260.
Strasser, T., Kraker, J. de, & Kemp, R. (2022). Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges. Global Sustainability, 5, e11.
